Long Road to Hard Truth by Robert Leon Wilkins

Author:Robert Leon Wilkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: African-American History;museums;Black history;National Museum of African American History and Culture;NMAAHC;Smithsonian;Washington DC;District of Columbia;US history
Publisher: Proud Legacy Publishing
Published: 2016-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Improbable, Unstoppable Coalition

The National Mall was a long way from the pig farm near Parker, Kansas, where Sam Brownback grew up. An avid runner, Brownback loved jogging along the Mall and admiring the beautiful monuments and museums. Aside from the exercise, these regular jogs helped the devout Senator recharge his spiritual batteries; he could pray and meditate about what it all meant and how best to serve the country as he took in the picturesque scenery.

In the spring of 2000, Brownback was deeply involved in the fight against the scourge of contemporary human trafficking, and he sponsored the groundbreaking Trafficking Victims Protection Act in the Senate, which passed Congress and was signed into law by the President later that year. As he ran past the various museums on the nation’s front yard, noticing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and pondering its admonition that we should “never forget,” he began to wonder why there was no museum to tell the story of the curse of American slavery, why there was nothing to ensure that our nation would never forget that horrific injustice. With that realization, he felt as if God was speaking to him, and he made a commitment to work toward the creation of such an institution.

First elected to the House in 1994, and to the Senate in 1996, Brownback missed the extensive Congressional debates over a national African American museum that took place in the 1980s and early 1990s. He soon learned that John Lewis had led those efforts in the House, and he contacted Lewis to ask if they could meet.

The meeting ran much longer than scheduled. Lewis and Brownback discussed their respective visions for a museum. While Brownback was initially focused on slavery, through their conversation, he came to support Lewis’s plan of creating a national museum that told not only the story of slavery, but of the entire African American experience, including the many contributions of African Americans to our society and culture.

Lewis’s office is itself practically a museum, the walls and shelves chock full of iconic photographs, memorabilia, plaques, awards, and books relating to his heroic work during the Civil Rights movement. As these two men got to know each other, Lewis pulled down a copy of Without Sanctuary from one of the overflowing shelves. Lewis had written the foreword for the book, which tells the story of lynching photography in America. Together, they flipped through the pages, pausing at a postcard that had been made of a lynching, in which a young White boy stood smiling for the camera while a festive White crowd and a tortured and disfigured Black man appeared in the background.

The symbolism was striking; here was a souvenir one would send or keep from a “vacation,” showing the racist indoctrination of a White child and an unabashed, public, illegal execution. From that moment forward, Lewis had an ally in the Senate. But Brownback was not just any ally; he was a Republican with the political capital and the will to bring this project to fruition.

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